Hell and High Water

When Hurricane Katrina reached the coastal town of Buras, La., on Monday, Aug. 29, 2005, there was no mistaking its power. Starting as a tropical depression, it had first made landfall near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., feeding on the moisture-rich Everglades as it headed west into the Gulf of Mexico. By Saturday, Aug. 27, Katrina's fierce winds and plummeting barometric pressure had served notice of its deadly intent. That evening, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center warned the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, that his city was in peril. "He said, 'Mr. Mayor, I've never seen a storm like this,' " Nagin recalled, adding, "Max scared the crap out of me."

Hurricanes draw strength from warm, open water, making the gulf an ideal host. Camille in 1969 packed winds of nearly 190 miles per hour; the Galveston hurricane of 1900, America's deadliest natural disaster, killed more than 8,000 people. Recently, as gulf waters have become even warmer, the storms have grown larger and more intense. Katrina would pummel an area the size of Britain — 90,000 square miles.

The hurricane hit Buras with a storm surge two stories high before moving north toward New Orleans, 63 miles away. In its path were the vanishing wetlands that serve to buffer inland communities from an onrushing storm. As it reached the city's edge, Katrina veered eastward, sparing New Orleans a direct hit as it closed in on the Mississippi coast. Though windows popped from buildings and power went out, there was a moment when it seemed that New Orleans had dodged a bullet. And then, as the sun reappeared, the water began to rise.

In his preface to "The Great Deluge," Douglas Brinkley writes, "My hope is that this history, fast out of the gates, may serve as an opening effort in Katrina scholarship." He needn't worry. A prolific author, known for publishing at breakneck speed, Brinkley has put his skills to good use by interviewing hundreds of Katrina survivors, disaster responders and public officials, and then weaving their disparate stories into a seamless narrative of the hurricane's momentous first week. It's a microhistory, logging in at more than 700 pages, but its thick detail provides a ground-level view of human behavior far richer than the breathless news reports that stunned and shamed the nation in the summer of 2005.

For Brinkley, who teaches history at Tulane University in New Orleans, Katrina has a deeply personal edge. One can easily read "The Great Deluge" as a morality tale, pitting helpless victims, heroic citizens and a few decent politicians against an inept bureaucracy at every link in the chain. This was an avoidable catastrophe, more the fault of man than of nature, Brinkley says, and those responsible must be held to account.

City administrators had done no serious hurricane planning, despite repeated warnings from the scientific community. Residents, for their part, had grown comfortable with the notion that hurricanes always seemed to skirt their city at the last moment, just like Georges in 1998 and Ivan in 2004. Furthermore, they sat behind a levee system built to withstand a Category 3 storm (exactly what Katrina turned out to be). Or so they thought.

Still, the initial news reports of Katrina's destruction led many to flee. By Saturday evening, when Mayfield phoned Nagin, an exodus was under way, part of a pattern known as "contra-flow" in which all lanes of traffic were directed out of New Orleans. Though Nagin "strongly advised" people to leave, he didn't issue a mandatory evacuation order until the following day. By then, about 20 percent of the 460,000 residents were still in the city.

Why did they stay? Brinkley's interviews show that some believed Katrina to be yet another false alarm. Others were determined to protect their property against looters. But most were poor, elderly or infirm — and couldn't leave on their own. Buses were supposed to evacuate them, but many of the drivers had fled the city and hardly anyone knew where to go to be picked up. Among the most infamous photos of the Katrina disaster are the ones showing rows of buses sitting idly on flooded ground.

On Monday, Katrina's storm surge overwhelmed the levees, eventually leaving 80 percent of the city underwater. (A recent report by the Army Corps of Engineers accepted responsibility for flaws in design and construction.) Americans were shocked by images of families huddled on rooftops and stranded on highway overpasses. The flooding produced a toxic swill of sewage, chemicals, rats, snakes and bloated corpses. Fires raged because there was no water available in a drowning city. Looters stripped stores of CD's and Nikes as well as bread and diapers. The New Orleans police performed dismally. Some officers fled the city in their cruisers; others stole Cadillacs from a dealership, claiming the cars were needed to transport Katrina victims. If that had been the case, Brinkley says, "they could have taken the Chevrolets."

Photo

New Orleans, Aug. 29, 2005.Credit
Associated Press

By Tuesday, public order had collapsed. Survivors straggled into the Superdome and the convention center, the refuges of last resort. Brinkley's descriptions of the living conditions, based on richly detailed interviews, are not for the faint of heart. Rarely have so many desperate Americans been so completely abandoned by their government.

Planning meant everything, notes Brinkley, who shrewdly lists the preparations of some groups in advance of the storm. The Louisiana S.P.C.A. safely trucked its pets to Houston. By stocking supplies and keeping its staff on site, the New Orleans Zoo saved all but four of its 1,400 animals. Though sustaining terrible losses, the aquarium airlifted penguins and other surviving animals to California; the piranhas were destroyed so they couldn't escape and start breeding in local waters. The United States Coast Guard positioned its boats and aircraft in safe havens just beyond Katrina's reach, allowing it to rescue thousands of victims and earning plaudits as "the little agency that could."

These are the exceptions. Brinkley hands down harsh but familiar judgments on others. The White House was remote and unresponsive, viewing natural disaster relief as a distraction from the war on terror. Michael Chertoff, secretary for homeland security, remained willfully ignorant of events in New Orleans, while Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, personified the cronyism that had corrupted FEMA in recent years. Following Brown's behavior during the crisis — his broken promises about sending buses and supplies, his private concerns about looking stylish and eating well — is an ordeal. Worse, FEMA routinely prevented others from lending a hand. In one instance, dozens of first responders — including firefighters and paramedics — were diverted from New Orleans to Atlanta "for training on rules against sexual harassment."

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While the government dithered, others filled the breach. Some of Brinkley's best writing describes the heroics of groups like the "Cajun Navy," composed of rural whites who strapped their boats to their pickups and traveled in caravans to New Orleans. Sweeping through black neighborhoods by day, sleeping in their trucks at night, the Cajuns saved close to 4,000 lives.

On the local level, Brinkley sees one villain above all. The Ray Nagin we meet in these pages is part coward, part showboat, part Uncle Tom. A pawn of the city's business elite, "always deferential to whites," he sold out his race, Brinkley insinuates, by breaking with "the civil rights tradition of the city's black leadership." When it came to poor people, the book suggests, the mayor couldn't have cared less.

It was Nagin who waited too long to order a mandatory evacuation, who left the buses to rot, who turned his back on those who couldn't leave. It was Nagin, "terrified for his own personal safety," who rarely visited the frantic throngs at the Superdome and the convention center, squandering the "bullhorn moment" that might have revived flagging spirits in New Orleans.

Nothing about him is too small to ignore. Before a meeting with President Bush on Air Force One, an attendant offered Nagin a chance to shower. Having been unable to bathe or change his clothes for several days, he gladly accepted, lingering under the steamy spray. "What was truly important to Nagin," Brinkley writes, "was that his head was shaved and waxed just right for his photo op. . . . There was something chillingly vain about Nagin's sense of judgment and his coiffing with the underclass suffering all around him." Forget the bullhorn moment. In Brinkley's view there is no such thing as an innocent moment for Nagin, who remains, from cover to cover, the fall guy of this book.

Those seeking a more condensed take on Katrina may prefer "Breach of Faith," a splendid mix of reporting and commentary by Jed Horne, a metro editor at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, which won two Pulitzer Prizes in 2006 for its hurricane coverage. The books tread similar ground. Horne, too, sees dysfunctional bureaucracy, not simply racism, as the key to the Katrina disaster, and his judgments of Bush-Brown-Chertoff are equally harsh. But Horne, with a sure grasp of local politics and culture, provides a clearer sense of why things fell apart so completely in New Orleans.

Tourists loved the Big Easy. They could stroll the French Quarter without ever seeing the New Orleans of those who served them their meals and cleaned their rooms. The city scraped bottom in every social category. Its politics were so corrupt that major companies loathed doing business there. Nagin promised change, Horne writes, and he made a pretty good start. Elected in 2002, he moved away from "the politics of backslapping and stuffed envelopes," especially alienating black pastors who were used to getting hefty government grants. By 2005, Nagin was legitimately funneling city contracts to a wide range of minority businesses. He had just announced plans to have the Trump organization build a luxury downtown condo tower, a huge ego boost for the city, when Katrina arrived.

Though Horne can be merciless in describing Nagin's failures during the storm, he never loses perspective. Given the city's crushing problems, hurricane planning was no one's priority. Indeed, when Nagin urged residents to evacuate during Hurricane Ivan, he was ridiculed after the storm missed the city. Determined not to be another Chicken Little, worried about the legal and economic consequences of closing down hotels and hospitals, Nagin held off too long. But late or not, symbolic or not, his mandatory evacuation order was the first one in the history of New Orleans.

Much has happened in the past 11 months. Nagin has been re-elected. The patched-up levees are supposedly stronger, and federal aid is flowing in. The population is two-thirds smaller now, with whites easily outnumbering blacks. How many people will return home from places like Houston, which offer more opportunity, is anyone's guess. New Orleans today is "a city on the brink," Horne concludes, perched ominously between "revival" and "permanent decline."

David Oshinsky is the Littlefield professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book, "Polio: An American Story," won this year's Pulitzer Prize for history.